Vote with the Facts!
Voter Guide
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2004, Vote with the Facts & US Face to Face
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War and International Affairs
Iraq
1) What are the consequences of the torture, sexual abuse and
murder at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad?
1) These abuses violate the Geneva Conventions.
2) These abuses further undermine the United
States' justification for war.
3) These abuses have further alienated the Iraqi public.
4) These abuses put US soldiers at greater risk all over the world.
5) These abuses caused further loss of any moral ground the United
States may have had in international policy.
By the fall of 2003, the majority of several thousand detainees in Abu Ghraib Prison were civilians who were picked up by the US
military during routine sweeps and at highway checkpoints. The final
report on the abuses of Abu Ghraib prisoners places
the responsibility with soldiers at Abu Ghraib Prison
and senior civilian and military officers at the Pentagon.
Sources: Seymour
M. Hersh, "Annals of National Security:
Torture at Abu Ghraib",
The New Yorker magazine, issue date 5/10/04;
posted 4/30/04;
www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?0;
www.amnesty.org/library;
Top Brass at Fault, Robert Burns, Associated
Press, The Examiner, August 25, 2004,
http://www.sfexaminer.com/article/index.cfm/i/082504b_abughraib
Amnesty International Report: The Gulf and
the Arabian Peninsula: EU-US Summit: End the EU's
embarrassing silence on US torture (News AMR 51/102/2004--June 24, 2004); Open
Letter from Amnesty International to the President of the European Council
Bertie Ahern on the occasion of the EU-US Summit, June 25-26, 2004;www.news.amnesty.org
2) Did Bush order the Pentagon to explore an invasion of Iraq
prior to September 11, 2001?
"President Bush ordered the Pentagon to explore the possibility of a
ground invasion of Iraq well before the United States was attacked on Sept. 11,
2001" an official told ABC News, confirming the account former Treasury
Secretary Paul O’Neill gives in a book written by former Wall Street Journal
reporter Ron Suskind. The official, who asked not to
be identified, was present in the same National Security Council meetings as
O’Neill immediately after Bush’s inauguration in January and February of
2001. O’Neill says that from the very start of his administration, Bush
was focused on ousting Saddam.
Source: "Corroborating O’Neill’s Account: Official Confirms Claims That
Saddam Was Bush’s Focus Before 9/11," John Cochran, ABC News, Jan.
13, 2004,
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/US/oneill_charges_040113.html
3) What specific evidence came from former Treasury Secretary O’Neill and
others concerning Bush’s plans to take over Iraq
prior to 9/11/01?
A Pentagon document dated March 5,
2001, "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts,"
includes a map of potential areas for exploration and outlines contractors
around the world from 30-40 countries.
An earlier document marked Secret from January 2001, "Plan for
post-Saddam Iraq,"
envisioned peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals, and even included plans
on divvying up Iraq’s
oil wealth.
Source: "Bush Sought ‘Way’ To Invade Iraq?"
60 Minutes, CBS News, Jan. 11, 2004,
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml
4) The Bush administration claimed that Iraq
was a threat to our security while countries neighboring Iraq
did not consider Iraq
to be a threat. Have any nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons been found in
Iraq as of 10/3/03?
No such weapons were found according to the UN weapons inspectors, the
CIA-led Iraq Survey Group (ISG), and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence
Agency.
Sources: "Search in Iraq Finds No Banned Weapons," Dana Priest and
Walter Pincus, Washington Post staff writers,
Fri., Oct. 3, 2003, p. A01, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35638-2003Oct2?language=printer
"2002 Report Found No Iraqi
Arsenal," Bryan Bender, Boston Globe article, reprinted in the San
Francisco Chronicle, Sat., June 7,
2003, p. A-1, http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/06/07/MN208710.DTL
5) What other reports concluded that there were no Weapons of Mass
Destruction?
Former U.S.
weapons inspector David Kay has said repeatedly that U.S.
intelligence was wrong in claiming that Saddam had stockpiles of chemical and
biological weapons and advanced nuclear weapons programs. Those programs were
the main justification for the Iraq
war.
A report from UN weapons inspectors to be released this week says they now
believe there were no weapons of mass destruction of any significance in Iraq
after 1994. The report, is the first outside study
that confirms the statements Kay made in January to the US Senate. At that
time, Kay told a Senate committee that he believed there were no WMD in Iraq.
Source: Kay calls on Bush to 'come clean' about WMD, Christian Science
Monitor, March 4, 2003,
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0304/dailyUpdate.html?s=entt
Kay: Bush Should Admit Error on Iraq WMD:
Ex-WMD Inspector David Kay Advises Bush to Admit He Was Wrong About Weapons in Iraq,
The Associated Press, Feb 13, 2004,
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20040213_696.html
Bush, Aides Ignored CIA Caveats on Iraq,
Washington Post - Feb 6, 2004,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A20194-2004Feb6¬Found=true
6) Did the CIA claim that Iraq
was an "imminent threat"?
No. In his first public defense of prewar intelligence, CIA Director George
Tenet said that U.S.
analysts had never claimed Iraq
was an imminent threat, the main argument used by President Bush for going to
war.
Source: CIA Boss: Iraq
Not Called Imminent Threat, CIA Director Defends
Intelligence Community, Says Analysts Never Called Iraq an Imminent Threat, The
Associated Press, Feb. 5, 2004,
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20040205_918.html
7) During the 1980s who sold weapons to Iraq
— and what kind? What kind of assistance did the US
provide and who was a special envoy to the Iraqi regime?
US, British, and German companies sold deadly weapons to the Iraqi regime.
Even with well-known reports of Hussein’s malicious use of weapons against his
own people, the Reagan and Bush Administrations both authorized the sale of
lethal weaponry to Iraq,
including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax
and bubonic plague. The Pentagon has since identified these strains of anthrax
as a central element of the Iraqi biological warfare program.
US
assistance to Iraq
in the war against Iran
also included the supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company.
Donald Rumsfeld, then a special presidential envoy,
helped to secure this "special relationship"
at a time when Iraq
was using chemical weapons on an almost daily basis. The Commerce Department
also facilitated the export of insecticides to Iraq,
despite growing evidence that they were "highly toxic" to humans and
could be used for chemical warfare — a direct contravention to the Geneva
Protocols of 1925. It should come as no surprise, then, that the same
American-mandated UN weapons inspectors found USA
brands on many of Iraq’s
chemical and missile components after the Gulf War.
Source: "U.S.
Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup," Michael Dobbs, Washington Post staff
writer, Dec. 30, 2002, p.
A01, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52241-2002Dec29?language=printer
8) The administration claimed there was a connection between Al-Qaeda and Iraq.
What is or was the connection?
To date, the administration has not come forward with any evidence of a
close relationship between Iraq
and Al-Qaeda.
Discrediting the significance of a leaked Pentagon memo purporting a
connection, one former senior intelligence official likened the memo to a
series of "data points . . . among the millions of holdings of the
intelligence agencies, many of which are simply not thought likely to be
true." The Pentagon followed suit, issuing its final word on the memo soon
after the leak had been released to the press. "News reports that the
Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts
between al Qaeda and Iraq
. . . are inaccurate." The Pentagon also said the memo "was not an
analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq
and al Qaeda and drew no conclusions."
Source: "CIA Seeks Probe of Iraq-Al Qaeda Memo
Leak," Walter Pincus, Washington Post
staff writer, Nov. 18, 2003,
p. A18,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A54452-2003Nov17¬Found=true
9) Colin Powell made a case before the UN to go to war with Iraq.
From what sources was Colin Powell’s report plagiarized, and how old were these
sources?
Colin Powell’s speech before the UN Security Council cited a 19-page British
dossier that was plagiarized, in large part, from an academic paper on Iraq
based on the 1991 Gulf War. Glen Rangwala, a lecturer
in politics at Cambridge University,
affirmed that pages 6-16 of the dossier were copied almost verbatim from the
13-year-old paper by Ibrahim al-Marashi.
The other two plagiarized sources, which constituted a further 6 pages of the
dossier, came from the commercial publication Jane’s Intelligence Review,
dated 1997 and 2002.
Sources: "Britain’s
Intelligence Crisis," Jane’s Intelligence Digest, Feb.
14, 2003, http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/jid/jid030214_1_n.shtml
"UK
accused of lifting dossier text," CNN, Feb.
7, 2003,
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/02/07/sprj.irq.uk.dossier/
10) Were the administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein was working on buying
nuclear materials from Africa based on facts?
No. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the claims
that Iraq had
attempted to buy 500 tons of uranium, known as "yellow cake," from Niger
were based on crude forgeries and falsified documents.
Source: "Who Lied To Whom?" Seymour M. Hersh,
The New Yorker, March 31, 2003,
http://newyorker.com/printable/?fact/030331fa_fact1
Source: "Open Warfare: Bush vs. the Intelligence Community," Ivan
Eland, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty, The
Independent Institute, Sept. 30, 2003,
http://www.independent.org/tii/news/030930Eland.html
11) Open: President Bush in the State of Union
address reported that Iraq
was buying nuclear grade materials from the African nation of Niger
despite a report to the contrary by the CIA and former Ambassador Wilson.
When Wilson’s report became public, the White House retaliated by outing his
undercover CIA agent wife in the national press, putting her and all her
contacts in the area of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) at grave risk.
How do you feel about this behavior on the part of this administration toward
agents who risk their lives on a daily basis for the sake of our country?
12) Open: Do you approve of unilateral military action by the US
or do you think we should cooperate with other nations to work out non-military
solutions to our international problems?
Please share this information face to face with as
many others as possible based on as much commitment you can muster in yourself
for your country, your fellow Americans and for the world. For more
referenced questions and answers please visit our website at: www.votewiththefacts.org